Zsuzsa Gyenes felt a wave of nausea at about 3 a.m., just hours after she received an emergency alert on her phone telling her a train derailed about a mile away from her home in East Palestine, Ohio.
A splitting headache followed, and she noticed a sweet plastic smell, “like a subtle, flowery Lysol that’s sickening,” she said in an interview. She could hear her 9-year-old son coughing from another room. When she opened his door, a wall of the sweet plastic smell, but stronger, hit her. He began vomiting and gasping for air.
“I was out of my mind, your survival instincts kick in at that point. I grabbed him, gave him some water and we left,” she said. “When I walked outside, that was a holy f— moment, when I could see the haze and the smell was so thick.” Gyenes checked into a hotel 20 miles away that night.
